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The Science Seminar Series: February 16, 2012
Jargon Wars: Landscape Genetics
Dr. Corey Anderson
Department of Biology
Valdosta State University
Time: 4:00 -5:00pm
Abstract
Interdisciplinary science can be very fruitful, but barriers exist, including discipline specific jargon. Sometimes, this is just a minor source of confusion; in other cases, it can affect scientific inferences. The emerging field of landscape genetics (which lies at the crossroads of population genetics, landscape ecology, and spatial statistics) is in the midst of this sort of “jargon war”. Terms such as “scale” are invoked frequently in the literature to refer to a variety of discrete concepts (where implied meaning is often dependent upon the background of the researcher and the particular application). Similar problems exist for other popular terms such as “genetic connectivity” and “genetic distance”. Further advancement in landscape genetics will require semantical clarification and a clear ontology relating important concepts.